In all these the ancients were inferior, and therefore they enjoyed less happiness.

The present state of Europe is vastly preferable to what it was in any former period.

And "the plan of this divine drama is opening more and more." In the future, Knowledge will increase and accumulate and diffuse itself to the lower ranks of society, who, by degrees, will find leisure for speculation; and looking beyond their immediate employment, they will consider the complex machine of society, and in time understand it better than those who now write about it.
See his Lectures, pp.

371, 388 sqq., 528-53.
The English thinker did not share all the views of his French masters.
As a Unitarian, he regarded Christianity as a "great remedy of vice and ignorance," part of the divine plan; and he ascribed to government a lesser role than they in the improvement of humanity.

He held, for instance, that the state should not interfere in education, arguing that this art was still in the experimental stage, and that the intervention of the civil power might stereotype a bad system.
Not less significant, though less influential, than the writings of Priestley and Ferguson was the work of James Dunbar, Professor of Philosophy at Aberdeen, entitled Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (2nd ed., 1781).